Readers Write: Letter-writer right on GN shopping wrongs

The Island Now

In her letter in the July 18th Great Neck News, Nadine Feingold asks “Is it just me?” regarding the deterioration of Middle Neck Road.

No, Nadine, it’s not just you. Those fabled shops and businesses which made downtown Great Neck Plaza as you described “as stunning as Madison Avenue” have long since been replaced by what you accurately have called “questionable stores.” Middle Neck Road and adjacent Plaza streets, once a shopping destination, are barely surviving.

A few years ago Major Celender of Great Neck Plaza, told us it was due to the recession, which everyone knew then and certainly knows now, never came to Great Neck. 

As I pointed out then, and reiterate now, with the streets filled with luxury cars and a dozen banks operating in Great Neck Plaza, it’s not a money issue. It’s a leadership issue. And Great Neck Plaza hasn’t enjoyed leadership in decades. Iconic businesses have departed because they can’t make a living here in the environment created by and presided over by Mayor Jean Celender and her hand-picked trustees (Queen Jean and the Rubberstamps).

Municipal government can’t make a business profitable or manage it. But municipal government has the obligation to “set the table” in such a way that a healthy and friendly environment exists. In the absence of this healthy environment the result is what we now experience strolling down Middle Neck Road: a plethora of vacancies, a plethora of double-parked cars, garbage disposal violations but, moreover, a plethora of honky-tonk, fly-by-night businesses most of which won’t last a year. 

Great Neck Plaza has stopped competing to be “best in class” and into this void has flowed what Mrs. Feingold properly refers to as “questionable stores”, some of which have acted as fronts for prostitution businesses.

And while the foregoing deterioration has taken place, Queen Jean who apparently blew up her own “planning” business decided to plan well for herself by becoming a “full time” mayor, paying herself $60,000/year, plus health insurance, plus pension benefits, and a brass mayor’s plaque for her car. And for rubber-stamping her deal, the trustees (the Rubberstamps) pay themselves $12,000/year, plus health insurance, plus pension benefits, plus the mandatory “get out of paying a ticket” brass plaque for their cars. 

 Until the residents of this village decide to actually treat a Mayoral election with respect and proffer a slate of responsible opponents who believe change is long overdue, Queen Jean and the Rubberstamps will continue to be re-elected, or more properly self-reappointed without opposition. 

The Plaza Village Hall has been run as a private club for decades by a small handful of individuals who through their collective ineptitude have run this village into the ground while handsomely compensating themselves.

No, Nadine, it’s not just you.

 

Alan A. Gray

Great Neck

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